Tommaso

Meet Tommaso.

(2019) Drama (Kino-Lorber) Willem Dafoe, Cristina Chiriac, Anna Ferrara, Stella Mastrantonio, Lorenzo Piazzoni, Alessandro Prato, Alessandra Camilla-Scarci. Directed by Abel Ferrara

 

Self-portraits can be extremely revealing; they can also be the product of an ego run amok. When art imitates life, you never quite know what you’re going to get; unflinching honesty, or fawning self-aggrandizement or something in between.

Tommaso (Dafoe) is an American ex-pat living in Rome with his much younger wife Nikki (Chiriac) and his three-year-old daughter DeeDee (Anna Ferrara). He is six years sober after years abusing alcohol, drugs and anyone unfortunate enough to be in his orbit. He is working on a sci-fi script about a man living in a post-apocalyptic wasteland who learns to love again, attends regular AA meetings, and runs drama classes when he’s not being tutored into learning the Italian language. He seems to dote on his daughter and is deeply in love with his wife, even though sex with a toddler in the house is nearly impossible.

Cracks begin to show in the façade; the more we learn about Tommaso, the more we see that he has a dark side that wasn’t entirely due to the drugs and booze. We also begin to understand that we are seeing events through Tommaso’s lens; not everything we see is real. He sees his wife with another man and soon becomes paranoid to the point where his wife begins to draw away from him. Tommaso has always been a womanizer; he begins to come on to one of his students who isn’t exactly against the idea. However, as much as he regrets the mistakes he’s made in his life and as open as he is to discussing them, he certainly isn’t above repeating them – or making all-new mistakes.

Dafoe as Tommaso is at the center of all the action here and Ferraro couldn’t have put his film in better hands. Dafoe is an actor who seems to be getting better with age, and while he doesn’t have the mystique of a Pacino or De Niro, he is every bit as good. Tommaso is one of his best performances ever, manic and soulful, good-hearted and yet demonic. Through Dafoe, Ferrara is able to ruminate on the nature of happiness and what it means to make yourself a better person – and how truly difficult that is.

Unfortunately, the choice to make this an internal point of view means that we never know if what we are seeing is real, or a dream, or madness. In one shocking scene, Tommaso imagines seeing his daughter crossing the street and getting hit by a taxi. It turns out that was a paranoid delusion, but was it? Maybe the scenes thereafter where the daughter lives are the illusion.

When Dafoe ends up crucified (an obvious nod to The Last Temptation of Christ), I really had to question if this wasn’t a vanity project after all. I’m no psychiatrist but imagining your cinematic avatar in a Christ-like pose seems to be a cry for years of therapy at the very least.

The movie goes off the rails near the end and by that point I was wishing that the film had not been quite so long. Ferrara is a gifted director and maybe this is his way of baring his soul and making amends. I don’t know. But I’m not sure if I’m up to giving absolution after two hours of mea culpas. I’m not sure anybody is, these days.

REASONS TO SEE: Dafoe continues to turn in magnificent performances.
REASONS TO AVOID: Somewhat pretentious and self-absorbed.
FAMILY VALUES: There is profanity as well as a fair amount of sex and some violence.
TRIVIAL PURSUIT: The wife and daughter of Tommaso are played by director Abel Ferrara’s actual wife and daughter.
BEYOND THE THEATERS: Virtual Cinema Experience
CRITICAL MASS: As of 6/7/20: Rotten Tomatoes: 85% positive reviews: Metacritic: 66/100.
COMPARISON SHOPPING: Broken Embraces
FINAL RATING: 6/10
NEXT: Serenity (2019)

Advertisement

David Lynch: The Art Life

Smoke ’em if you got ’em.

(2016) Documentary (Janus) David Lynch. Directed by Jon Nguyen, Rick Barnes and Olivia Neergaard-Holm

 

David Lynch is one of the most celebrated, iconoclastic and cerebral directors in cinematic history. From his breakout in 1977 with Eraserhead, his filmography has an impressive list of films including Elephant Man, Dune, Mulholland Drive, Wild at Heart, Blue Velvet, The Straight Story and of course the legendary TV series Twin Peaks which he has just resumed with a sequel on Showtime. While he hasn’t made a narrative feature film since 2006 (Inland Empire), he has remained busy with a plethora of short films (most of which can be found on his website) as well as writing music and painting.

This documentary is mainly directed by longtime admirer Nguyen and the hero worship is evident. Nguyen emulates the style and the pacing of a Lynch film which I suppose is appropriate; therefore rather than getting a straight documentary film that tells Lynch’s story as a filmmaker, we get the director himself narrating the story of his childhood, adolescent and young adult years essentially leading up to Eraserhead. We see that his first love is painting (which he continues to do to this day) and that he lived a fairly normal, suburban life in the 50s and early 60s as his research scientist father moved them regularly to states in the Pacific Northwest and Big Sky country.

Lynch speaks very warmly about his mom who once she discovered his talent at drawing refused to buy him coloring books although she bought them for his siblings. This had the effect of forcing Lynch to use his imagination and coming up with his own pictures rather than filling in the blanks for someone else’s.

So where does the darkness that fills almost all of Lynch’s art, both cinematic and painting, come from? Lynch, notoriously reticent, is cagey about that. He discusses an incident in which he and his siblings were playing outside after dark when a naked woman, bleeding from the mouth, staggered onto the cul-de-sac on which he lived and sat down on the curb and wept. Lynch talks about not knowing what to do, and apparently the incident stayed with him; it sounds very much like a moment out of his own films.

Lynch had a love of painting and when he discovered that the father of one of his school chums was artist Bushnell Keeler, he knew he had a calling. Keeler encouraged him, allowed him to rent space in his workshop and when David’s father threatened to throw him out after the two argued about a curfew, Keeler came to the rescue and assured the elder Lynch that his son was working hard on a passion, something he wished his own son would do. Keeler also helped get Lynch into the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts where Lynch began to thrive.

If you’re looking for a movie that is going to explain the influences on Lynch’s cinematic career, or explore his methodology and inspirations, you’ve not going to find it here. The film ends essentially with Eraserhead and none of his other cinematic works gets so much as a mention here. In true Lynch style, we get next to nothing of what we want to know and instead have to make do with what he’s willing to tell us. That may drive less enthusiastic fans bonkers but his diehard followers will nod sanguinely and enjoy the ride.

This is the rare documentary that isn’t a parade of talking heads. There’s only one here – Lynch himself – and we see him throughout, wreathed in a fog of cigarette smoke (Lynch is more or less a chain smoker and has been since youth), an everpresent glass of Coke at his side. Mostly he paints on-camera although from time to time he plays with his toddler daughter Lula (to whom the film is dedicated) or stares off contemplatively into the distance. This is a bit of a double-edged sword. The film isn’t cluttered but at the same time we get no other viewpoints. We see images of his brothers, his sister, his friends (like the inimitable Jack Fisk) but we don’t hear from them. Everything in this movie is through Lynch’s eyes, or the eyes of the filmmakers.

Consequently we’re left to gaze at Lynch painting, smoking and reminiscing. He can be a charming raconteur but there are times he starts an anecdote, pauses, then says “I can’t talk about that right now” and moves on. Like the painting he is working on, it is left intriguingly but infuriatingly unfinished for the audience. Sadly at least for my part, I found this somewhat boring after awhile. It was the cinematic equivalent of reading a Wikipedia entry and served to make one of the most interesting filmmakers extant actually boring. That’s unforgivable as far as I’m concerned.

REASONS TO GO: The filmmakers do an admirable job of making this look and pace very much like Lynch’s own work.
REASONS TO STAY: This is very much for Lynch fans. We get no other point of view other than Lynch’s own.
FAMILY VALUES: There is a little bit of profanity, some art nudity and a whole lot of smoking.
TRIVIAL PURSUIT: The film was funded through a Kickstarter campaign; those who gave money at a certain level were awarded Producer credits.
BEYOND THE THEATERS: Amazon, iTunes
CRITICAL MASS: As of 5/29/17: Rotten Tomatoes: 89% positive reviews. Metacritic: 75/100.
COMPARISON SHOPPING: Richard Linklater: Dream is Destiny
FINAL RATING:4.5/10
NEXT: Fate of the Furious

Angels Crest

Here’s an angel that Charlie missed.

(2011) Drama (Magnolia) Thomas Dekker, Lynn Collins, Jeremy Piven, Mira Sorvino, Elizabeth McGovern, Emma Macgillivray, Joseph Morgan, Greg Lawson, Chris Ippolito, Dave Brown, Colin A. Campbell, Marty Antonini, Ameko Eks Mass Carroll, Jonathan Lachlan Stewart, Julian Domingues, Aedan Tomney, Wally Houn, Lindsay Burns, Barbara Williams, Christianne Hirt, Kate Walsh. Directed by Gaby Dellal

Bad things happen, sometimes to good people and sometimes to bad. Even the worst of events that occur have nothing to do with a person’s goodness or lack thereof. What the true measure of a person is depends on how they deal with the truly awful things that life throws at us.

Ethan (Dekker) is a 21-year-old young man who works at an auto shop in the working-class Rocky Mountain town of Angels Crest. It’s one of those places where everyone knows everyone else, where rugged individualism is the expectation and where the bleak winters often mirror the bleak outlook for many, who have no hope of escaping the lives they lead.

Ethan is the father to 3-year-old Nate (Carroll) and his sole caregiver, mainly because Nate’s mommy Cindy (Collins) is a mess, a raging alcoholic who can barely care for herself with a side order of promiscuity. One bright afternoon, Ethan takes Nate for a boy’s trip into the woods. On the way back, an exhausted Nate falls asleep and as Ethan drives towards town, he sees some deer. For whatever reason, he gets out of his truck, makes sure Nate is strapped in to his child’s seat, and leaving the heater running, follows the deer out into the woods.

You can guess that wasn’t a very smart idea. When Ethan returns to the truck, Nate is gone. He searches through the woods fruitlessly, then races back to town, returning with a search party but Nate is nowhere to be found. It takes a little while but little Nate is eventually found, frozen to death. Of course, Ethan is devastated and the hot mess that is Cindy blames Ethan for her little boy’s demise.

The town is sharply divided by the event, some joining Cindy in blaming Ethan and calling for his arrest for negligence (a feeling that the prosecutor (Piven) shares) while others believe Ethan when he says he was gone for just a few minutes and that this was just one of those horrible things that could have happened to anyone.

Like Atom Egoyan’s The Sweet Hereafter, the film examines the effects of a tragedy on a small town but the similarities end there. In the Egoyan film, the school bus accident that took the lives of a fair amount of children touched nearly every family in town; here, the directly affected are few. Still, the howls of Ethan’s grief are no less heart-wrenching no matter the number of children lost; in some ways the grief of a single person is more relatable than the grief of multiple people.

But the movie goes off the rails because of the excessive number of subplots which for the most part have no real bearing on the matter of hand. There is a lesbian couple (McGovern and Walsh) struggling for acceptance, with McGovern trying to win the affections of her own son (Domingues) who is also a horror show. The prosecutor has some deep dark secret that is motivating him to obsessively pursue an investigation that is tearing the town apart. A diner waitress (Sorvino) struggles to raise her own son on her own and happens to be Cindy’s best friend. Ethan’s best friend (Lawson) feels guilt over having been banging Cindy at the time of the incident.

All of these little subplots are enacted by characters whose only reason to be in the movie is to be involved in these subplots. They add no insight and don’t really enhance the story any. While the movie is beautifully shot with plenty of picturesque snow-covered vistas, the whole thing feels a bit like a soap opera more than a drama. While some of the scenes carry a good deal of emotional resonance, an equal number of scenes fall flat. This is as inconsistent a film as you’re likely to see.

Still, there is enough here that the movie is worth a casual glance if the opportunity presents itself although I wouldn’t put a whole lot of effort into seeking it out. The deficiencies in the film’s story and script nearly (but don’t quite) exceed the movie’s emotional impact.

WHY RENT THIS: Some of the scenes work. Evocative. Beautiful cinematography.
WHY RENT SOMETHING ELSE: Some of the scenes don’t. Heavy-handed and plodding. Soap opera-esque.
FAMILY VALUES: Adult themes, strong language and some sexual content.
TRIVIAL PURSUIT: The film was titled Abandoned in the UK.
NOTABLE DVD EXTRAS: There are interviews with Dekker and Sorvino.
BOX OFFICE PERFORMANCE: $832 on an unknown production budget.
SITES TO SEE: Netflix. Amazon, iTunes, Google Play, Vudu
COMPARISON SHOPPING: Gone Baby Gone
FINAL RATING: 6/10
NEXT: Creed